C C P

C C P Alliance

Looking forward to all your feedback. CCP Rise and I have been working hard on these changes and we think they'll be great for the drone ecosystem as a whole.

:Edit:

I'm seeing a fair bit of confusion about the details of the Sentry changes. I left the nitty gritty details out of the text section of the blog since they don't lend themselves to easy summaries and the actual numbers were in the spreadsheet, but I'll go over the end results of the changes to T1 and T2 sentries here so people can see the whole picture. These numbers assume max skills:

Garoun Investment Bank

Gallente Federation

Overall, the changes look good. I didn't see any mention of change to drone behavior though. Has there been any thought to allowing bonuses to affect drone speed while they're NOT mwding? For most situtations, the mwd-orbit-mwd-orbit cycle that drones go through significantly hurts their applied dps. My understanding is that all drone speed bonuses only affect MWD speed. I could be wrong, but if not, it seems like that would be a good change.

edit: i realize this could lead to cases where drones out-track themselves by virtue of orbiting too fast? I guess this is more complicated than I initially thought.

Infinite Point

Test Alliance Please Ignore

Dev Blog was really quite hazy about the some of the important bit of the Sentry Drone alterations.

With the base increase of T1 Sentries, and the 2% increase per level, will a char with say Racial Drone spec IV and all the other drone skills maxed deal equal or less damage with a set of T2 Sentries (Say Gardes) than they did previously with the same skills?

You spelled the damage changes out quite clearly for everything else, but left the effects on T2 sentries quite hazy.

Aperture Harmonics

Sounds pretty good to me. I wish you guys used this rebalance as a time to adjust fighter size (and carrier drone bay size to match), so that carriers cannot carry as many extra drones. Make them 600m3 if you are worried about subcaps being able to carry them, or better yet, make them 300m3.

Dev Blog was really quite hazy about the some of the important bit of the Sentry Drone alterations.

With the base increase of T1 Sentries, and the 2% increase per level, will a char with say Racial Drone spec IV and all the other drone skills maxed deal equal or less damage with a set of T2 Sentries (Say Gardes) than they did previously with the same skills?[

You spelled the damage changes out quite clearly for everything else, but left the effects on T2 sentries quite hazy.

This was mainly because the spelling out the details a bit more long winded for sentries since they're not changing by uniform percentages. I decided to pass along the basics and let the spreadsheet at the end provide the specifics.

In practice, damage with T2 Gardes and Bouncers will be going down a bit (but with Bouncers gaining a lot of tracking and Gardes gaining a fair amount of falloff) while damage with T2 Curators and Wardens goes up a bit.

The opportunities for confusion about the crimewarch implications of actions (the pilot who assisted the drones would lose sec status and get gate guns without any direct action on their part) means this is not something we plan to change.

Drone assist will continue to be a mechanic that is somewhat limited in empire space, along with other mechanics such as bombs and bubbles.